Staff Editorial: D.C. must balance historic preservation with the need to move forward

Current News Staff Writer
|
10/25/2017 |
Current Newspapers

The West Heating Plant is located at 29th and K streets NW. (Brian Kapur/The Current/April 2015)

We live in a historic city — there’s no question about
that. The nation’s capital features not only the great civic buildings
and gleaming monuments around the National Mall, but also the evidence
of more than 200 years of development progress. Farms became row houses
and businesses; woodlands became shopping centers; and architects
introduced a wide variety of styles that came to define locations and
eras.

But the District continues to grow. Our historic strength
as the center of American government is increasingly augmented by other
industries, which steadily attract new residents to the city. Today’s
D.C. reflects the many periods it’s passed through, including the
current day.

We would hate to see the District’s varied decades swept
away and replaced with block after block of glassy modernity. But at the
same time, we’ve seen overprotective preservationists sometimes
threaten to stifle the District’s population growth and architectural
diversity. We’re speaking of attempts to freeze in time even the most
anonymous or downright undesirable buildings.

Two recent examples stand out. One
is Georgetown’s West Heating Plant, a vacant industrial structure that
sits jarringly apart from its high-end residential surroundings and that
blocks off access to Rock Creek’s junction with the C&O Canal.
Another is a Pepco substation in Friendship Heights, a squat windowless
rectangle that helps deaden a block that could host transit-oriented
development and neighborhood-serving retail.

In both places, preservation groups have launched bids to
declare the properties historic landmarks. Their architecture is
emblematic of their eras, and they served valuable support functions as
the District grew.

But does that mean that the buildings should stand forever
as a monument to the 1940s? Should widely supported plans to convert
the West Heating Plant into condos be shelved in favor of a
110-foot-tall testament to the federal office buildings it once heated,
with no feasible reuse in sight? Should the substation at 5210 Wisconsin
Ave. NW always represent the era in which it was constructed merely
because it was, in fact, constructed at that time?

In a recent article
on the substation, the Greater Greater Washington blog noted that
today’s criteria for historic landmark status can apply nearly anywhere.
“If you squint, basically every building is ‘associated’ with some
events,” the blog’s David Alpert wrote. “And does any building not
embody characteristics of its method of construction?”

We approve wholeheartedly of protecting exemplary,
evocative buildings and communities, but not buildings that simply
aren’t notable.

To be clear, we agree that historic preservation isn’t a
beauty contest, and we recognize that the District features numerous
successful examples of adaptive reuse. But those arguments don’t justify
the protection of any and every building. There are ways to honor local
history without holding onto every relic of the past — and our growing
population demands that we find them.